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<center><h1>Welcome!</h1></center>

<h2>You are about to visit the Tetragotchi World</h2>
<p>
    The tetragotchi live on a planet of land and water, and they drink water to survive.  You will create your
    own personal tetragotchi to live among them.  They are not intelligent, so you will have to train
    yours using Darwinian Evolution to give it a chance of survival.  It will live on whether you are playing the
    game or not, even while you sleep.
</p>

<h2>Control</h2>
<p>
    Mostly you control things with your keyboard, and the available keys are always shown on the screen.  To travel,
    pressing ENTER brings you closer and pressing ESCAPE takes you further away, and the arrow keys are for navigating
    around. Changing into the next mode, such as starting an evolution episode, is done with SPACE, and when you want
    to retreat to a previous mode, you hold SHIFT while pressing SPACE.
    You use the mouse for telling your gotchi where to go or which other gotchi to pursue, giving it a
    goal.
</p>

<h2>Resistance is Futile</h2>
<p>
    Your goal is to assimilate as many other tetragotchis as possible, and to avoid getting assimilated yourself.
    You start the chase by selecting another gotchi as your prey, which makes yours follow theirs for as long as it
    takes.  When they touch, the fitness of both predator and prey are evaluated to see which will survive and
    which will perish. The assimilated gotchi is reborn with the same body structure as its predator, but it will
    have to evolve muscle coordination on its own.  Fitness is visible as the tail behind each tetragotchi which traces
    where they have been in the last day.  To become fit enough to assimilate another gotchi, you will need to be
    running quickly before you attack.
</p>

<h2>Central Time and Local Time</h2>
<p>
    The tetragotchi in their world are really moving in extreme slow motion.  While playing the game, your computer
    simulates time at more than a thousand times that speed, and you can see that it is quickly simulating several
    gotchi hours into the future.  In their time, it can take hours to make a few steps and days to make a long
    journey.  You see them as they will probably be in the future, but nothing that you see happening will really
    happen until later, and by then other players may have changed strategy.
</p>

<h2>Parallel Evolution</h2>
<p>
    Your gotchi must learn to coordinate its muscles to be able to walk, and this is done by a special accelerated
    parallel evolution under your control.
    When you enter evolution mode a group of clones of your gotchi will be created on the spot where your original gotchi is
    standing, and each one of them will have a slightly mutated muscle contraction gene.
    The weakest movers in this group of clones are eliminated and replaced with new mutated clones of the stronger
    ones, in a continuing process of refinement until some kind of crawling behavior emerges.
</p>

<h2>The Halo</h2>
<p>
    You will see a line structure surrounding your gotchi when it is in the adult stage and it shows what the gotchi
    is doing.  It is light blue when the gotchi is drinking and otherwise it shows how the gotchi is deciding how
    to move.  Each corner of the halo corresponds to a muscle gene, and you can see which one is activated by
    its color.  During evolution, only activated genes are mutated.
</p>

<h2>Sphere of Land and Energy-Water</h2>
<p>
    The sphere is divided into triangle patches and their color indicates how much water each one contains.
    Whenever your tetragotchi is less than full, it will try and drink from the patch that it is touching.
</p>

<h2>Their Basic Instinct</h2>
<p>
    When you are not playing, your gotchi will continue to approach the goal that you have given it, but once it
    gets too close to that goal, it will switch into auto-pilot using its only instinct.
    Depending on whether its energy level is full or empty, it will choose the goal of a nearby triangular patch
    which has more or less water on it.
</p>

<h2>Birth and Rebirth</h2>
<p>
    To get started the first time, you have to go down to the surface and press SHIFT-SPACE.  While your gotchi still
    has a shield in its own slow-time, you can press SHIFT-SPACE again to try again if you are not satisfied with
    the shape of your body.  Once you have completed your first evolution episode, your structure will be fixed, but
    not before. Later in the game, after you have been assimilated, you will always inherit the body of your predator.
    In this way, better bodies should prevail.
</p>

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